It begins, for our purposes, with an adopted baby abandoned at age 3 by his adoptive father, with a single mom working hard to make ends meet and a wild child growing up on The Strand in Hermosa Beach.

While inland kids dreamed of that sunny between-the-piers existence, Brent Mayhew was living it, attending Redondo Union and Mira Costa high schools when he felt like it and partying when he felt like it. Which was most of the time for this midsize, blond-haired surfer boy with a built-in craving for all that a barely supervised life had to offer.

“Here’s what I know about my biological family,” the iron-handed, now 37-year-old Mayhew told me Monday, “my father was a pro football player and an alcoholic.”

I won’t psychoanalyze Mayhew because I can’t.

Neither can he, not really. Which is to say that whatever thing or things, specifically, sent his life crashing off the rails is anybody’s guess. So I’ll let his next statement serve as enveloping action: “I had my first drink at 13; by 15 I was a regular drinker.”

At 15 he also drank himself into the first of a thousand blackouts as he lived the beach rat scene, drinking and surfing, surfing and drinking, smoking weed, doing coke, stealing and fighting.

There was lots of fighting and run-ins with the law.

“Everything was easier when I was drunk. I could come out of my shell. I fit in. What was I anyway, but a kid without a father, a kid with a mom who worked all the time, so with her gone, it was keg parties all day. Then came juvie and more fights and lots of atta-boys from the other guys. And all the time I was so scared and I didn’t want anyone to know it.”

By 15 he was in probation camp. “I wasn’t listening to anybody,” he said, recalling that boy.

“When I got out, I picked up where I left off, only now I was worse. In 1984, the Olympics year, I was back inside figuring, well, this is what my life is going to be.”

He was right, too. From then until age 35 he spent maybe three years on the outside. The reasons read like a not-to-do list with drunken assaults, bad drug deals, 12 parole violations and failed drug tests. He did it all and more and what’s odd is how he now comes off as well-mannered and thoughtful.

“Yeah, now,” he laughs. And the truth is, with a story like his, you either laugh or you cry. On this day he was doing some of each because both are now benefits. “I was in prisons all over the state. But don’t be fooled, there’s no rehabilitation going on in any of those places. There is booze and drugs in there, anything you want.”

So, no, he wasn’t clean in the joint. And he certainly wasn’t clean when he got out five years ago, hanging around just long enough to get his girlfriend pregnant with what turned out to be the beginning of his salvation.

“I came out with all intentions of stopping but, face it, this is a party town and I kept telling myself that I was only doing the normal thing, partying. I wanted to quit but I was still a jerk. Soon I was back inside.”

Then came what can be called the closing scenes of Act I.

“I held my baby girl for the first time in prison. Right then I felt an overwhelming love for someone for the first time in my life,” he said, tears filling his eyes.

And wouldn’t it be nice to say that it all ended there, that he went straight and became the man that he is now. But that’s not how it worked. Fact is, there was still a ways to go before he struck hard bottom. Soon he was out on the streets again, drunk, missing a date with his daughter and hearing her little 3-year-old voice on the phone asking, “Daddy, where are you?”

“I finally felt like a complete dirt bag. I had nobody and nowhere to go and I was standing alone in the rain on The Strand, in the place where it all started. Right there I told God, `I don’t want to be like this anymore.”‘

Act I of the Brent Mayhew’s story ended officially on Sept. 28, 2005, the day that he checked into San Pedro’s Beacon House. This is a residential recovery facility that specializes in second acts.

“I drank myself into oblivion and for some reason I had been saved. I had played the victim for so long to justify my life. But once I admitted that my life was unmanageable, I resolved to stop,” he said, rolling up his left sleeve to expose the prison tattoos that wind like a loopy road up his arm.

By the way, he means “saved” in a cosmic sense, in the way of a man who is still taking in the enormity of a reprieve that allows him to coach his 5-year-old daughter’s soccer team and attend PTA meetings like these are the most momentous things in the entire world.

And just last week he was awarded Beacon House’s second annual Michael Fry Memorial Scholarship, an award named for a man who also found new life in this place. The award carries money that covers his tuition at Cal State Dominguez Hills, where he is working toward a certificate in alcohol and drug counseling.

When he finally brings the experience of all those dead years to bear on the lives of people who are still kidding themselves, when a sober life finally becomes his full-bore reality, then that will mark the beginning of Act III, the best act of them all.

This I say because alcoholism is an always fatal disease that can’t be cured. But it can be arrested and men can change.

“All the cogs had to be lined up for this to happen,” he said. “Now I’m free to become the person that I always wanted to be but didn’t know how. I’m free and it is an amazing thing.”